At 8.25pm on Tuesday, September 14, Chelsea are midway through the first half of their opening game in this season’s Champions League and the defending champions are struggling to break down Zenit Saint Petersburg’s resolute defence.
England international Reece James is playing right wing-back but, like a few of his team-mates, is finding it hard work until summer signing Romelu Lukaku gets in at the back post with a 69th-minute header.
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Twenty miles away in Cobham, the upmarket Surrey village where Chelsea train, another job is getting done at James’ house but this one looks a lot easier.
Four men, wearing overalls and balaclavas, force their way through his metal swing gates, stroll around to the back of the property, shine torches through the patio doors to check the owner really is elsewhere, take a sledgehammer to a side door and then come out the front with a large safe. The only time they look remotely panicked is when they realise they cannot open the gates wide enough for their getaway car and will have to push the large metal box to the pavement.
Inside it are the Champions League and European Super Cup winners’ medals James won earlier this year, as well as the runners-up medal he earned playing for England at Euro 2020 this summer. Gone in 360 seconds.
Two days later, he would post the CCTV footage of this heist on Instagram.
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“These medals were won representing Chelsea and England — honours that can never be taken away from me whether or not I have the physical medals to prove it,” the 21-year-old wrote.
“Nevertheless, I am appealing to all my Chelsea and England fans to help identify and turn in these low-life individuals who will never be able to rest easy as the evidence is mounting against them. The police, my advisers and Chelsea FC (and many others) are all behind me as we have firm leads on who the perpetrators are. We are closing in on them.
“Luckily, no one was present during the break-in but I want to let all of you know I am safe and well. I really do appreciate having the platform to tell you all about my misfortune and I hope together we can catch these individuals and deliver justice where it is due.”
Compared to Robin Olsen, James was lucky.
Now at Sheffield United, the Swedish goalkeeper was on loan at Everton in March when a masked gang with machetes broke into his house near Altrincham, a market town in Greater Manchester, and stole some jewellery. The 31-year-old was at home with his wife and two children at the time and although nobody got hurt, it was a harrowing ordeal.
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Only a month before on Merseyside, two masked robbers broke into the Crosby home of Olsen’s boss, Carlo Ancelotti. The Everton manager was away but his daughter was in and disturbed the intruders. Luckily, they did not hang about but took a safe with them.
Last year, it was Tottenham’s turn, as Jan Vertonghen’s family were held at knifepoint by intruders while the Belgian defender was playing a Champions League game in Leipzig in March. And two months later, Dele Alli was threatened with knives and punched during a burglary at his north London home.
“The football industry is unique,” says Simon Giddins, managing director of Blackstone Consultancy, a private security firm based in London.
“We’re talking about rich, young men who often wear their wealth, be that with jewellery or watches, and put it all over social media.
“And you have a timetable. How many industries are there where you can know where people will be months in advance? And everyone knows where the training grounds are, so you can work out the routes.
“There is also an issue of how easy it is to find out where these guys live, particularly in the north west (of England). If I got off the train in Manchester and hopped in a taxi, I could give the driver £100 and say, ‘Show me where all the players live’.
“Everyone knows and that pushes them to gated communities, where they will be guarded by someone whose company has probably won that contract on price. That’s a placebo effect, a false sense of security.”
This is not a new phenomenon. Between 2006 and 2009, nearly two dozen Premier League players were burgled in the fashionable suburbs of Liverpool and Manchester alone. Dubbed “away-day robberies”, most of these attacks involved gangs targeting footballers’ houses while they were playing.
But that did not necessarily mean the houses were empty. Steven Gerrard’s wife was upstairs watching him on television when masked intruders broke into their mansion in Formby. Their two young daughters were upstairs in bed, too. Thankfully, the raiders escaped with just a few valuables and car keys.
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Seven months later, Emile Heskey’s partner was subjected to a similar ordeal when armed men attacked their Cheshire home in broad daylight. In 2009, Darren Fletcher was playing for Manchester United in Milan while three masked men broke into his home, threatened his girlfriend with a knife and stole jewellery.
Now and then, though, these cowards pick on the wrong house. Current Everton assistant manager Duncan Ferguson was a combative striker but is an even fiercer guard dog. In 2001, he wrestled one burglar to the ground and sat on him until the police arrived. In 2003, he knocked another one out with a meaty punch.
But not everyone wants a “Big Dunc” on patrol, 24/7.
“The knee-jerk reaction is to hire a few heavies to sit outside your house and follow you around, or get one of the big security companies to plaster your house in cameras,” says Jesse Learoyd-Hill, a former football agent who set up Elite Security Professionals in 2014.
“But how many people need protection officers permanently? Not many. You should be trying to make life as easy and as normal as possible for your clients.
“It’s no good fitting cameras if you are then just going to let some bloke you don’t know install your fancy home entertainment system. You could just be letting a bad guy — a burglar or blackmailer — enter your house via your devices. You need to screen these people.
“When I saw the Reece James video, my first thought was, ‘Who advised him?’. Why is he keeping his medals — the things he cannot replace — in a safe at home? Did he have a dummy safe? If he did, how did those guys know where the real one was? Entry was very easy — no security door?
“You are never going to make a house impregnable but you want to build systems that delay intruders. Do that and you give your alarms and cameras a chance to do something.”
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Giddins agrees.
“There’s a reason they used to put moats around castles,” he says. “I’m not suggesting we start doing that again but having layers to your security is sensible.
“Take safe rooms: we see a lot of poor advice. You’ll get walk-in wardrobes that have been converted into safe rooms but if you’ve got children and you are woken up at two in the morning by the sound of intruders breaking in, you’re not running to the wardrobe, you’re going to get your kids.
“Protection officers are invasive and you often just end up just raising your profile, which is counter-productive. What you want is a protective surveillance team to identify anyone who is targeting players.
“We employ a lot of women to do this work because men are programmed not to feel these threats and women can often blend into the background more easily. If you walk down the road and see two guys in a car, your inner alley cat is going to say, ‘I wonder what they’re doing?’. But if you see two women chatting, I don’t think you’d even register it.”
It’s all good advice but sounds expensive. Who pays: club or player?
Daniel Lloyd-John is the chief executive and founder of Broadway Insurance Brokers, a specialist risk adviser and broker based in Cheshire’s footballer belt.
“There are two parts to it,” Lloyd-John explains. “The club will insure its risks — the player’s health and fitness, brand damage, that sort of stuff — and the player will take out their own life insurance, but that’s just the player-related part.
“What we’re talking about is insurance for the house, the cars, the valuables — personal insurance that you or I could get. That’s the player’s responsibility.
“But there is overlap because a club is not going to want any of its key employees unhappy or worried, and there is also overlap between the two brands: club and player.”
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Lloyd-John has been working with Giddins’ firm to present clubs, players and their agents with comprehensive risk assessments, security advice and cover that delivers when they really need it.
“It’s about identifying, managing and transferring risk,” he says. “My focus is what we call ‘inside the perimeter’: the home, contents, digital and IT risks. But the player has to leave that perimeter and that entails new risks.
“Whose responsibility is that? The club’s, their employer? Or the player’s? I would say it’s the responsibility of the club to ensure the player gets the information they need.”
There are multiple grey areas, then, as players move in and out of their employer’s space but without ever really being completely detached from the club, and that is before we even consider their families and entourages.
A player could have a partner with an equally high profile and a huge social media following. Whose job is it to point out that burglars can learn a lot from a photoshoot of the happy couple in their wonderful home or lockdown dance video?
“There are several glossy magazines that are some of the most popular subscriptions in the UK prison system,” says Giddins. “I am aware of a case where someone was in a magazine published on Monday and burgled on Friday.”
You have pictures of the living room, the kitchen, the garden, the shattered-glass sensors, the alarm panel, the dogs… in other words, a burglar’s risk assessment form.
“The big insurers are all switched on to this now and are doing their due diligence,” says Lloyd-John.
“That’s when we might come back to the issue of price and I would say to the client, ‘I don’t want to see pictures of you and your family modelling jewellery and gadgets at home, or showing people where you keep your medals’.”
Lloyd-John knows he is not going to keep his clients off social media — their agents keep telling them to make hay while the sun shines — but he might be able to persuade them to do that photoshoot at their nearest beauty spot to “displace the risk”.
“And don’t forget the impact of this on the club’s brand. If a player gets done over, their club’s reputation or share price will suffer. The club’s commercial directors will certainly be worried about it.”
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Both Giddins and Lloyd-John said, in their experience, the big clubs in Liverpool and Manchester take their duty-of-care responsibilities seriously, perhaps more so than clubs elsewhere. But that might be because they have to.
“Players have more anonymity in London,” says Giddins.
“If you look at the national crime statistics, the north west is pretty high up there for aggravated burglary,” adds Lloyd-John.
A club source told The Athletic there are significant differences between Premier League clubs in terms of their risk profiles.
“Most players in London live in apartment buildings that have a 24-hour concierge service — they are not getting burgled on the 28th floor,” he says. “But it’s different in other parts of the country and you do get players living in more rural areas, particularly players with families.
“That said, I’ve only had to deal with two burglaries during my career. We put them up in hotels immediately and they both ended up moving soon after, which is understandable. My job was to deal with the police, fix the doors and help with the insurance claim.
“Players don’t care about the cars, gadgets or watches that get nicked but they do get upset about medals, shirts, memorabilia. I always told them to keep anything they couldn’t replace in a safety deposit box at the bank.
“But I don’t think footballers are facing a burglary epidemic or they all need bodyguards. Most of them are still able to put a baseball cap on and go to the supermarket without any trouble but because they’re famous, any incidents make the papers.
“Some clubs have looked at providing protection officers but it costs £100,000 per player — £2.5 million a year for the squad. It’s unnecessary, although if you ask a security expert, they’ll tell you the players need SWAT teams, packs of dogs and helicopters.”
This suggestion — that the scale of the problem has been exaggerated by a combination of recency bias and our obsession with footballers’ lives — would appear to be supported by the fact Learoyd-Hill has found no takers for the security briefing he has been offering to clubs.
It is also not a hot topic for the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA).
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“We used to have a partnership with a company called Lakeland Security,” a PFA spokesperson says. “However, as an issue, we found it was concentrated at the higher end of the Premier League and those clubs typically have their own provisions in place for players.
“We did circulate details to the membership but it hasn’t come up as a prominent issue.”
But Giddins, Learoyd-Hill and Lloyd-John think this is a mistake. When they talk to law enforcement agencies, look at crime patterns or plunge into the dark web for intel, they fear the worst.
“We believe we’re heading into a 12-month period when the police and other services are going to be under even more strain — the pandemic has to be paid for,” warns Giddins.
“We can already see rising inflation and a growing gap between rich and poor. That is only going to make wealthy people with high profiles more vulnerable.
“We’ll see a rise in aggravated burglaries, with horrible threats of violence, and it will be very sophisticated. They’ll be very DNA-aware, they will turn up in numbers, with masks, carrying weapons.
“Relying on CCTV isn’t going to work. Two 4x4s, kick the door in, what we call a ‘noisy attack’, and they’re out in nine minutes. And they’ll know it has to be nine minutes because they’ll have tested the police response to that area. They might even fake an accident to delay the police response.”
Or the attacks will take place in the middle of the day, on public highways, in front of dozens of witnesses, as Andy Carroll, Mesut Ozil and others have discovered.
Jonathan Booker is a former general secretary of the Association of Football Agents and now runs Chiron Sports and Media, an “independent ethical sports agency”.
“I’d like to think most agents place client security and insurance high on the priority list, as it is not just for the benefit of the player but also the player’s family, the club, as well as the agent themselves,” says Booker.
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“However, it really does vary from agent to agent and, sadly, in too many cases it seems that not much, if any, proactive thought is given on such aspects, until after something unfortunate happens.
“Many agents see the matter of insurance as somewhat of a ‘box-ticking’ exercise, or even a chore or expense, and often inadequate cover is put in place. In some cases, an agent may totally neglect to ensure a client is adequately protected, seeing it as the responsibility of the player or club, which is short-sighted and a gamble for all who may be affected.
“Sadly, we hear far too often of a cure rather than a prevention approach and, in extreme cases, the misguided tactic of players aligning themselves with ‘bigger and badder’ heavies rather than sourcing professional service providers.”
Even more worryingly, Learoyd-Hill says he has had conversations about security for players where an agent has simply asked, “What’s in it for me?”, while Giddins has lost count of the times he has been asked for a discount.
“I tell them, ‘I’m not a market stall — this is how much it costs!'” he says. “And we could be talking about a complete security assessment that costs £3,000 but might save them hundreds of thousands of pounds, not to mention the psychological toll of a burglary.”
Sometimes the best advice costs nothing or could be some extra lighting bought from your nearest DIY store.
Giddins tells his clients to use micro accounts, with small amounts of money in them, to shop online with or order takeaways. “So if there is a data breach, your pot of gold is still safe,” he explains.
He also suggests we could all be a little less trusting of the person wandering around the area wearing a delivery company’s uniform and carrying a parcel. Are they really looking for number 83 or are they casing the joint?
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But, most of all, he advises we stop making “the classic British mistake of thinking all criminals are stupid”. After all, he explains, the police usually know who the crooks are but cannot prove it. It is not uncommon now, for example, for a gang to put their loot in a waterproof bag, dig a hole and GPS tag it until the coast is clear “like pirates and buried treasure”.
And sometimes they are not even trying to take something away.
“If you get burgled and they don’t really take anything, I bet you think, ‘Phew, I got away with that one’,” says Giddins. “I’m thinking they photographed the back of the router or they’ve left something behind, a camera or a bug. I’d be thinking about blackmail.”
There will, of course, be some of you who are reaching for your smallest violins.
As mentioned, this only seems to be an issue for footballers rich enough to live in large, detached houses in the countryside or leafier suburbs; young men who can afford to buy another flat-screen TV, Rolex or Gucci handbag pretty easily, and pay such high premiums on their car insurance they might not even put in a claim for a stolen Mini.
But what about their families? And what if the next person who gets hurt in one of these burglaries is not someone daft enough to break into Duncan Ferguson’s house?
Earlier this year, Paris Saint-Germain star Angel Di Maria was substituted halfway through the second half of a Ligue 1 game against Nantes. The Argentina international had just been told his home had been burgled and his family were present. He was in tears as he disappeared down the tunnel.
The parents of his team-mate Marquinhos were also burgled during the game. They were at home, too, but thankfully nobody in either attack was hurt.
Di Maria did not know that when he left the pitch, though, and for him, it must have brought back terrifying memories of the attack on his house in 2015 when he was playing for Manchester United. Some, including former United team-mate Wayne Rooney, believe the incident shook him and his family so badly that it ruined his prospects of succeeding at the club.
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PSG, for what it is worth, might want to divert some of their budget towards security before players decide the French capital is not a safe working environment. Dani Alves, Mauro Icardi, Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting and Thiago Silva, twice, have all been robbed while at the club in recent seasons.
And that really is the fundamental point.
As Learoyd-Hill puts it: “You would think that with all the money that goes around football, a small percentage could be set aside for keeping the game’s most important assets, the stars of the show, safe and secure.”
(Top photo: Getty Images/Design: Sam Richardson)
